We are currently in the process of moving our website hosting away from AWS S3 and onto Netlify. As you might imagine we want to be very safe with this transfer to avoid taking our website, application or email down during this transition.

The domain we want to use for our website is “rossintelligence.com” and it is currently hosted by GoDaddy. For this, we are planning on replacing the Nameservers in GoDaddy with the ones Netlify has provided us with.

Our DNS record management is done in AWS Route53 and this is where we are less confident in our approach. We currently have some MX records for our mail server, an A record for an AWS Cloudfront CDN, NS Nameserver records pointing to the GoDaddy Nameservers, an SOA record, a TXT records, and a bunch of records for our various subdomains. What if anything will we have to change in our Route53 records to ensure a smooth transition to Netlify?

Is it possible to just leave the mail server and CDN related records in Route 53?

When you want to use our managed DNS hosting, you have to make changes to your domain’s name server settings. Changing name servers on Route53 isn’t quite as obvious as with other domain registrars. There are a number of instances where an NS record was created for a domain instead of changing the actual name servers for your whole domain which won’t work.
That said, on AWS Route53, you will need to follow the steps found in AWS’s DNS documentation.
Following these steps should get things work…

If you need something more specific after giving that a read through, let us know